ROBIN MAGOWAN
225
street house seemed as good a place as any other .
But nature with her usual abhorrence of vacuums slipped into
my life K., a thin, pink-skinned , chaff-haired first year high school _
teacher from Pasadena. While this repaired brightly enough some of
the sexual havoc, another side of me was being suppressed . This was
the writer, and it counted because it was the only thing I knew that
constantly made me happy. K. tried to demolish this. She felt she
had a mission in life to erase this myth of a self I clung to; this pen
that accompanied me everywhere- more a part of my attire than
my hip-pocket wallet. Every evening over the dinner table
K.
would
launch this interview, "Why do you write?" " Do you see God?"
As she snatched I would rise to the bait and grab back, and even
stand there holding this damn pen like a priest's miter over my head
as I declared all that I needed to keep it for. I must have looked
rather silly standing there like a 1973 St. George, having no idea who
the dragon was, or how on earth I was to dispatch it with just this
single shabby instrument.
In the midst of all this excitement a recommendation request
from Nancy Ling Perry dawned. She had been an A student in a
senior criticism seminar, and now and again, hair teased out like
some wonderful prostitute, had turned up as a class auditor. The
note , ballpoint over pink, red-lined , school paper read:
not having accomplished the Tibetan Ritual of Suicide here I
ami I'll see you again
Robin Magowan-
time is gone-but if you can dig it-scrawl something on
here. Why aren 't you teaching anymore?? I'm writing and
working but i'm going to become
a
doctor.
my
name is Nancy
Ling Perry. you have taught
me
all the best things about
reading & writing . .. many many years ago.
The name is that of the principal spokesman for the Symbionese
Liberation Army, the interracial Berkeley group that abducted
Patricia Hearst. But for me at that moment it stood for a bright,
sexy girl who had been married to a black composer. Wanting a
way out of my claustrophobic home situation I got out my pen and
dashed off a letter saying that I had just sent in the recommendation,
